Specialty goods and services may have distinctive features or information associated with an individual serving, unit, batch, or lot of a product that can add value to a transaction, and a consumer may be interested in knowing such specific information about a product they either purchased or are interested in purchasing. In the instance of food for example, a consumer may want to know various aspects of a food product, such as specific characteristics of the food product, origin of the food product, as well as who produced it, how it was produced, and information related to the seller of the food product.
Some companies may choose to make such product information freely available to customers. For example, some companies utilize barcodes as a way of allowing a consumer to retrieve information related to a product that has been, or will be, purchased. Many sellers utilize some form of a point of sale (POS) system to provide a barcode tied to a particular product (e.g., a barcode affixed to a coffee cup, barcode printed on a receipt, etc.). Current POS systems generally provide barcodes having static information embedded thereon. Upon purchasing a product, the consumer can scan the static barcode (e.g., via a smartphone equipped with barcode scanner software) and receive product information related to the food product they purchased.
A problem with that approach is that the barcodes are normally applied at the point of production to every instance of a product, or to every instance produced at a given location or time, and the barcodes refer all such instances to the same body of information, i.e., the content being delivered is static and the same for every purchaser of the barcoded product. Due to the static nature of the barcoded product, sellers are unable to provide comprehensive and dynamic information related to a product at the point of sale or delivery in real-, or near real-, time.